Buy European @feddit.uk Fanmion @discuss.tchncs.de 2d ago

EU alternative to Intel, AMD and Nvidia

Are there no any EU alternative to those gaming hardware company? If we start now making GPU and CPU from scratch, how far behind are we?

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30 odd years. EU stopped innovating in 90's to 00's.

One good thing about the current US mercantillism is that people in EU finally notice that they've been asleep at the wheel for decades.
- No, they carried on innovating but followed the money because only major sources of capital outside EU would back their ideas.
  
  Shame on us Europeans.
- in the ’90s* to ’00s*
  
  Are you a bot, or is this your hobby?
- someone has to make a start
  
  You could add Apple to the avoid american list as they make the m chips.
ARM is a UK company that sells more CPUs than Intel and AMD combined. They dominate the mobile market. Literally all phone chips use ARM technology. Their GPUs are not bad for tablets and phones.

They been trying to get their CPUs onto the desktop and server markets for years, and they are beginning to get some success stories on both.
- Yes, but they don't design or manufacture their own chips.
  
  A full-European solution just doesn't exist today, but I think an Exynos chip from Samsung is the best compromise.
  
  Licensed from ARM (UK), designed and fabbed by Samsung (South Korea) with equipment from ASML (EU).
  
  ARM main business model is the sell of IP. They fully design their CPUs along with a host of surrounding technologies, like the interconnect. In order to prove their design work and are fit for purpose they have to send to TSMC and other fabs. Small customers buy their IP as is and then integrate it onto their designs. Their most expensive license is the Architectural licence. This means they allow the buyer to completely redesign their Chios, while maintaining compatibility with the Software. Large companies like Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Samsung and others buy this licence and produce chips like the Exynos, or graviton.
- The problems with ARM is their involvement with Israel.
I mean there is ASML. As I understood you do not manufacture modern chips if you don’t have one of their machines.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding

Edit: Typo
- ASML relies on US patent for their machines... with that being said in event US going rogue, the know how would enable EU to at least make the machines and TSMC hows how to make the chips.
  
  Why would anyone respect US IP if US going to behave like it is doing now...
  
  A lot of US power comes from good will, and we about pissed all of that away.
  
  Zelensky white house meeting will be marker of the beginning of the end.
There was (still is?) an AMD (then GlobalFoundries) fab in Dresden, Germany, so some local European know-how does at least exist I believe. Still probably very very far from actually independently competing with the big players
- I think due licencing issue of x86 there could be problems. Maybe we need new architecture or RISC-V
Lol good luck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings
- Didn't Nvidia try to buy arm in the past?
- maybe only hope
There are Asian alternatives, not sure about Euro
Their supply chains are quite globalized.

There have been mobile competitors like Imagination, but the reality is cutting edge chip design is enormously expensive and hard, and there’s a big performance gulf. Imagination (and others) can’t afford to fab their own designs, and no one takes them up on it unless it’s a mobile chip or something.

SiPearl was working on a rather massive ARM CPU: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16072/sipearl-lets-rhea-design-leak-72x-zeus-cores-4x-hbm2e-46-ddr5

Looks like the effort is still alive, but it was focused on server stuff and compute.
- Thanks for the information! I have added Imagination and SiPearl to the list of hardware alternatives. Gotta start somewhere hehe.
  
  Update: Imagination is headquartered in the UK however most of the ownership of the company is held by the Chinese government.
No replacement for gaming chips. However, at least there's a Raspberry Pi to replace all these Intel N100 mini-PC's.

I doubt we'll see powerful gaming CPU's and GPU's anytime soon, if at all.
According to the lastest steam hardware survey non-rgb gpus make up 0.23% of the market. Most of that is likely to be Apple Silicon unfortunately.

Though the Pinetime's cpu is designed by a norwegian company called Nordic Semiconductor. Maybe we could look into them for scaling up.
Somebody could try poking imagination technologies into releasing a powervr based GPU for the PC. They haven't done that since the Kyro 2 in 2001. Been very active in mobile, they powered apple phones for a long time and still pay them licence fees for their home grown tech.
- There might be incentive for that now? They totally could especially if some mass shifts to Linux.
  
  Dxvk also makes life monumentally easier for them, in terms of backwards compatibility, and that wasn’t always a good option until recently.
  
  I can't help but think their tile based rendering would be a perfect fit for a chiplet design, making multiple compute chiplets a natural way of doing implementing it with the architecture.

28 comments